If you can't pronounce Iraq, don't invade it
Ignorance could lead U.S. into a another Lebanon or Vietnam
G. JEFFERSON PRICE III
Baltimore Sun
If the United States actually is going to invade Iraq and occupy it for a
while, at least people in charge of this idea might start pronouncing it
correctly.
It's not "eye-rack" as the leaders of the Washington cabal advocating
invasion and occupation tend to pronounce it. It's "ih-rock."
The failure to pronounce properly the names of places where the United
States has sent troops and tried to take charge is symptomatic of historical
failures going back at least as far as Vietnam.
In Vietnam, the pronunciations always seemed to have a sort of U.S. Southern
twang to them. This may have been because President Johnson was a Texan.
Vietnamese places sounded like music scores, body parts or automobile parts:
"Kan-toe," "My Toe," and "Cam-ran."
In the early 1980s, U.S. military advisers appeared in Lebanon, along with a
contingent of Marines. Many of the advisers were veterans of Vietnam, and
place names in Lebanon were inflicted by the twang. So, Choueifat, a suburb
of Beirut overlooking the airport where the main Marine contingent was
stationed, was called something like "chewy fat." The Lebanese military
headquarters at Yarzeh was "Yarzee."
Hardly any of the U.S. military group in Lebanon seemed to speak Arabic, or
to comprehend Lebanon's history or politics.
Secretary of State George Shultz actually got the Christian-dominated
Lebanese to sign a peace agreement with Israel in May 1983. But Shultz
hadn't bothered to consult Syria, so the agreement was stillborn.
Five months later, a suicide truck bomber killed 241 Americans at the Marine
barracks in Beirut. The Marines were gone within a few months.
Today, Syria runs Lebanon, an occupation that the United States effectively
sanctioned after Syria joined the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq in the
Persian Gulf war of 1991. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed, Syrian-condoned
Islamic militia, runs South Lebanon. Hezbollah masterminded that attack on
the Marine barracks in 1983.
This was not what Americans had in mind for Lebanon.
Iraq is similar to Lebanon in some disturbing ways.
To be sure, the U.S. government and the American people know more about Iraq
than they did about Vietnam and Lebanon in the beginning of those
experiences. The U.S. oil industry was intimately involved with Iraq for
decades. America has fought a war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein has been a
prominent American headache ever since. Intelligence-gathering and
war-making resources are infinitely more sophisticated than they were four
decades ago when the United States began its involvement in Vietnam, or 20
years ago when it was dragged into the Lebanon quagmire.
Still, like Lebanon, there are complicated factions in Iraq whose behavior
in the event of an attack and an occupation is wholly unpredictable.
The Kurds in the north, the very people against whom Hussein used chemical
weapons, are getting along quite well as the conduit for much of Iraq's
smuggled oil and other illegal commerce. Their loyalty historically has gone
to the highest bidder.
The south is predominantly Shiite, a historically repressed and impoverished
part of the population with strong ties to neighboring Shiite Iran. (In
Lebanon, the United States had no sense of the stunning potential for
upheaval from the Shiite population -- until it was too late.)
In the center are the Sunni Muslims who have historically dominated the
country. They are estimated to be about 34 percent of Iraq's population,
compared with a little more than 60 percent who are Shiite. Their dominance
would inevitably be challenged by the Kurds and the Shiites.
One very important element exists in the Iraqi calculation that did not
exist in Lebanon or Vietnam: Iraq's vast oil resources raise the stakes
enormously and dangerously, because all the parties will want to control
them. And if it looks to any of them as if the American occupiers are
controlling the oil for their own profit, or for the profit of one part of
the population over another, expect lethal consequences.
These are but a few of the complications America faces with Iraq. It's good
that the talk of war and occupation has stalled a little: It gives us more
time to learn the language and to understand the potentially fatal nuances.
Better still, maybe an invasion and a long occupation won't be necessary at
all.
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